Read Online Taft by Ann Patchett - Free Book Online Page A

had a heart attack.
    "God, I'm sorry," Fay said, scared as me. "I thought you knew I was here still."
    We stood across the room from each other, all the chairs turned upside down on the tables. The place always seemed so much bigger when it was empty. Nicer too. A nice bar. "Why are you still here?"
    "Carl didn't come," she said. Her voice was quiet, but I could hear it so clearly. All night I'd been screaming to make myself heard over the noise.
    "So I'll take you home," I said.
    "Then what if he comes here? What if I miss him?" She sounded so nervous, I wondered if she knew more than I was giving her credit for. "I could go home and then he would come here."
    "So then he goes home. Carl knows that somebody'd take you." Carl knew that I would take you. "He wouldn't not come if he thought you were going to be standing around outside."
    She nodded her head. I could see it. My eyes were adjusting to the dark. "That's true," she said.
    Of course, there was almost no chance that Carl was going to be at home, wherever that turned out to be. If he was in a state in which he was still capable of remembering, he would have remembered Fay. "Come on," I said. "We need to go out the back. I've got all this money."
    "Money?"
    I held up the bag. "From the bar."
    "I thought it always stayed in the cash register," she said, and pulled on her jacket.
    A person would think I'd feel a lot more worried taking this girl to the bank with me, since now I was responsible for both her and the money, but the truth was I liked it better this way. I was thinking about her and not the roaming crackheads. She got out of the car and followed me right to the cash drawer. I took the key out of my pocket and opened it up.
    "You have a key to the bank?" Fay said, impressed.
    "Only to a very small part of it." Then I dropped the money in.
    "Like mailing a letter," she said, watching the blue bag slide down the chute into someplace nobody could get at it.
    I was thinking, Hell of a letter.
    Fay didn't talk going over to her house. She just gave me directions and none of them in advance. She told me to get on Union and keep going. We went through downtown, past long stretches of sleeping auto body shops and used car lots, past Sun studios and the Baptist hospital, where Marion used to work. The only bright thing that time of night was the occasional Jim Dandy store, lit up in a firestorm of electric lights. "You want anything," I said, and pointed to one up ahead. "Soda or anything?" I don't know why I was asking.
    "No, I'm fine, thanks." Fay kept a sharp eye out the window, looking for her brother in every direction. Union was getting nicer all the time, until finally we were out past the big houses on Landis and she started pointing to where I should turn, Poplar then Chickasaw. Out there the lawns all looked like parks trimmed with mazes of dried out winter hedges. Everybody seemed to have at least a half dozen columns. This was old money Memphis. This is what the people out in Germantown dreamed about.
    "Up here," she said, and pointed. God knows, there wasn't a bus going from where we'd been to all the way out there. A cab would have cost her half of what she'd made that night. "It isn't our house," she said when I pulled into the driveway. "It's my aunt and uncle's."
    "Nice," I said. Big and brick with a castle thing on the front. Everything trimmed and straight and squared away. It wasn't by any means the biggest place out there, but it still would have made a nice small hotel.
    "It's not the kind of house I'd live in," Fay said, even though it was clear she lived there. Maybe she didn't want me to think she was a rich girl and didn't really need the job, or maybe she was apologizing for having nice things. "Well, thanks for bringing me. I know it's a haul, middle of the night and everything." She had her hand on the door, but she was just sitting there, looking at the house, which was dark except for a front porch light. "Can you find your way back all